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<h1><a href="https://archiveofourown.org/works/27882450">raised a baby girl/been a better son</a> by <a class='authorlink' href='https://archiveofourown.org/users/winter_hiems/pseuds/winter_hiems'>winter_hiems</a></h1>

<table class="full">

<tr><td><b>Category:</b></td><td>X-Men (Comicverse), X-Men - All Media Types, X-Men Legacy</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Genre:</b></td><td>Autistic David Haller, Canon Autistic Character, Canon Disabled Character, Canon Jewish Character, Dissociative Identity Disorder, Don't copy to another site, F/M, Gender Dysphoria, Gender Identity, Intimacy, Kissing, Mental Health Issues, Non-Sexual Intimacy, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Trans Character, Trans Female Character, Trans Male Character, Transitioning</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Language:</b></td><td>English</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Status:</b></td><td>Completed</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Published:</b></td><td>2020-12-04</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Updated:</b></td><td>2020-12-04</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Packaged:</b></td><td>2021-05-10 15:26:59</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Rating:</b></td><td>Teen And Up Audiences</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Warnings:</b></td><td>No Archive Warnings Apply</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Chapters:</b></td><td>1</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Words:</b></td><td>2,084</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Publisher:</b></td><td>archiveofourown.org</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Story URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/works/27882450</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Author URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/users/winter_hiems/pseuds/winter_hiems</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Summary:</b></td><td><div class="userstuff">
              <p>On their second date, Ruth told David something about her, worrying that he would reject her.</p><p>As things turned out, they have more in common than she thought.</p>
            </div></td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Relationships:</b></td><td>Ruth Aldine/David Haller</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Comments:</b></td><td>5</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Kudos:</b></td><td>12</td></tr>

</table>

<a name="section0001"><h2>raised a baby girl/been a better son</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Author's Note:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
      <p>By sheer coincidence, I finished writing this the day before Elliot Page came out as trans. (Good for him.)</p>
    </blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>When Ruth was little, her mother had worked all hours. Every cent had been saved, with nothing left over for something as luxurious as a haircut. Luca, her vicious older brother, had cut his hair himself, a choppy chin-length style that he deemed ‘cool’.
</p><p>
Ruth’s hair, meanwhile, grew out. Her mother had apologised, said that Ruth’s hair was too long to be a ‘boy style’, and promised to cut it when she had time. She never had time, and Ruth never told her mother how much she loved the feel of her hair across her shoulders and down her back. Even at that age, she knew that boys weren’t supposed to enjoy that.
</p><p>
Her clothes were all hand-me-downs from Luca, including her sleep shirt, which was a t-shirt that was far too big for her; it went down past her knees.
</p><p>
In the same way that she knew she wasn’t supposed to like having long hair, Ruth knew that she wasn’t supposed to like the way that the bottom of the t-shirt swirled around her legs like a dress. Almost exactly like a dress.
</p><p>
Long hair.
</p><p>
An almost-dress.
</p><p>
These were the things she knew she wasn’t meant to enjoy, in the same way that she knew she wasn’t supposed to daydream about boys.
</p><p>
After Luca killed their mother, Ruth ended up in an orphanage. They took her to a room full of donated clothes and told her to pick out what she wanted.
</p><p>
She saw a pair of jeans, which she knew she was supposed to want, and a skirt which she bundled up inside a t-shirt and smuggled back to her room.
</p><p>
Later that night, she put it on and looked at herself in the mirror for nearly an hour.
</p><p>
It stayed hidden at the back of her wardrobe for the next five years, even after it didn’t fit her anymore.
</p><p>
When she went to Xavier’s School for the Gifted, she asked them if she could pick a new name, and Dr Grey said, “Of course you can. Lots of students have already picked out their mutant names.”
</p><p>
“I don’t –<sub><span class="small"> sorry</span></sub> – mean a mutant name. I want,<sub><span class="small"> please, please</span></sub>, to be called Ruth.”
</p><p>
Jean Grey looked at her for a little while, and said, “Okay.”
</p><p>
The advantage of a school with half a dozen telepaths in it was that they knew that Ruth was a girl, definitely a girl, had always been a girl. There were subsidies for paying for a legal change of name, and she managed to get on hormones before puberty could change her body too much.
</p><p>
There was Megan, her new roommate, who showed her how to apply lip gloss, and there were skirts that flared out enough that she didn’t need to tuck, and now she only wore jeans when she wanted to, not when she felt she had to.
</p><p>
And a few years later, there had been a boy who she liked very much, and Ruth knew she had to tell him. His telepathy was as powerful as hers, and very likely stronger. If he didn’t see it in one of her childhood memories by accident, then he would definitely find out if they ever got physical together, so she knew she had to tell him.
</p><p>
It was their second date; she didn’t want to be accused of lying or leading him on.
</p><p>
Ruth’s nerves made her stammer so bad that she could barely get the sentence out, but the gist of it was that before they went any further with the whole boyfriend-girlfriend thing, she wanted David to know that she was trans. She managed to get out a few half-sentences about estrogen and puberty blockers before she gave up and waited for David to pass judgement.
</p><p>
“Huh,” he said, then: “Me too. I thought you already knew.”
</p><p>
And he pulled down the collar of his shirt enough that Ruth could see the top of his binder.
</p>
<p></p><div class="center">
  <p>*</p>
</div><p>
There was a girl on Muir Island. She’d been a patient there since she was six.
</p><p>
She had no friends, and the only people she got to talk to every day were the doctors and the nurses, and the people who lived in her head.
</p><p>
By the time she was twelve, she knew she was a lesbian. Girls were pretty and cool and amazing, but the idea of being with a boy was gross. Ew. Definitely not for her.
</p><p>
She’d always figured that, were she allowed to dress in anything other than boring white hospital clothes, she’d be butch. Leather jackets and leather cuffs. Stompy black boots. Clothes like that would make her feel more at home in her own skin.
</p><p>
She didn’t mind how she looked – skinny and sharp-cheekboned, with a face that probably wouldn’t grow up to be beautiful, but promised to be interesting at the very least.
</p><p>
But then puberty happened, and her body began to feel wrong. It was changing, changing in ways that she didn’t want it to change, it wasn’t mean to look like this, his body wasn’t mean to be shaped like this, the reflection in the mirror wasn’t what he was supposed to look like.
</p><p>
It was at that moment that he realised the gender in which he’d begun to think of himself.
</p>
<p></p><div class="center">
  <p>*</p>
</div><p>
His father tried the shape of his old name, but was unable to say it. In the end, he settled for, “What have you done?”
</p><p>
David sat behind the bars of his cell, his legs neatly crossed. He couldn’t regret his decision. “They wouldn’t listen to me. I told them that I was a boy, but they just thought it was an alter, and they kept calling me by <i>that name</i>. They wouldn’t stop. So now they can’t say I’m a girl. Nobody can.” In a moment of desperation and isolation, he had bent reality to his will. It was no longer possible to refer to him as ‘she’, or for anyone to call him by <i>that name.</i>
</p><p>
“Your mother’s upset. Not that you’re transgender; she understands that. But she can’t say the name she gave you anymore.”
</p><p>
“She can say it,” David corrected him, “She just can’t apply it to me. I have a new name now.”
</p>
<p></p><div class="center">
  <p>*</p>
</div><p>
There was a prayer for Jewish men where they thanked God for not making them a woman.
</p><p>
David knew that the meaning of the prayer wasn’t sexist; the interpretation was that men were given more mitzvot than women, so you were supposed to thank God for the challenge.
</p><p>
Nevertheless, he found it slightly ironic.
</p><p>
(Besides, there were at least six genders in the Torah. Plenty of room for someone like David.)
</p>
<p></p><div class="center">
  <p>*</p>
</div><p>
Something else he found ironic was the way people changed the way they viewed him. Behaviours that had previously been written off as him ‘just being a girl’ had now been relabelled as symptoms, which linked together to form a diagnosis, which meant that he was autistic.
</p><p>
David doubted that he would have been diagnosed autistic if he hadn’t been a boy.
</p>
<p></p><div class="center">
  <p>*</p>
</div><p>
They wouldn’t let him take testosterone. They weren’t sure how it would react with the other medication he was on.
</p><p>
Binders were also not an option. The doctors and nurses didn’t want to try wrestling him in and out of one every day, no matter how much he promised that he wouldn’t fight. They seemed to think that he’d react the same way to a binder as he would a straitjacket, but they were wrong. The straitjacket wasn’t something he wanted, but the binder was.
</p><p>
Except he wasn’t allowed to wear one, and puberty kept fucking going on.
</p><p>
His body was not meant to be like this.
</p><p>
So in another fit of desperation, he reached for his ability to manipulate reality.
</p><p>
His grip was not perfect. He could not change everything.
</p><p>
By the end of it, he still needed the binder.
</p><p>
But he had made changes. He was taller, his voice had dropped, his hips were narrower, and bones had shifted until his face was on the masculine side of androgynous. And (thank fuck) he no longer got his period.
</p><p>
His hair stubbornly refused to be cut short, but David figured that cis guys had long hair too, so he was pretty sure he could pull it off.
</p><p>
When he was sent to the Himalayas to live with Merzah, he had finally been allowed a binder.
</p><p>
(Merzah had transitioned in the forties, one of the first trans men to ever go on testosterone. His philosophy was that if David wanted a binder, then he should be allowed one.)
</p>
<p></p><div class="center">
  <p>*</p>
</div><p>
They were lying side by side on David’s bed in his cabin in the middle of nowhere. The date had been fun, and the making out afterwards had been – well.
</p><p>
“David?”
</p><p>
“Hmm?”
</p><p>
“It’s getting late.”
</p><p>
“Do you need to get back to the mansion?”
</p><p>
“No. I meant your binder.”
</p><p>
David sat up. “Fuck, you’re right. It’s time I was taking it off.” He pulled his arms through the holes in his t-shirt, struggled around for a bit, then put his arms back out through the holes in his shirt with the binder clutched in one hand.
</p><p>
He lay back down. An illusion covered his chest so that there was no visible change. It didn’t need to be particularly strong; he knew Ruth would never try to see under it. “Such a love-hate relationship with that thing. Can’t live without it but it’s so<i> tight</i>. Next time I have access to reality manipulation, I am getting those things off my chest.”
</p><p>
“Or top surgery,” Ruth suggested.
</p><p>
David let out a breath. “I don’t think I can risk that. Not the surgery – though I can’t pretend to be enthusiastic about voluntarily going through another medical procedure after what they did to me on Muir. It’s more about the sheer number of people who’d take advantage if they found out that I was going to let myself be sedated. Top surgery would be great, but it wouldn’t be worth spending the rest of my life in an induced coma.”
</p><p>
They were quiet for a time.
</p><p>
“What if I watched over you?” said Ruth softly. “Made sure that nobody took advantage of you being vulnerable.”
</p><p>
David shifted to look at her. “Are you sure you want to do that? You’d have to be on alert for hours while the operation happened.”
</p><p>
She took his hand. “I was in the closet for years. Being trans in the South… not a safe way to live. Then when I came to the mansion, I could suddenly present however I wanted. And they gave me hormones and skirts and makeup. I – I’m not sure if I ever want bottom surgery, but if I did then they’d pay for that too. You’ve never had options about your transition the way I did. But you should. So yes, I’ll watch over you.”
</p>
<p></p><div class="center">
  <p>*</p>
</div><p>
Before he went under, he said, “Promise me that I’ll wake up.”
</p><p>
“I promise.”
</p>
<p></p><div class="center">
  <p>*</p>
</div><p>
When he woke, his first instinct was to panic. Historically, waking up in a hospital bed had never boded anything good for him.
</p><p>
Once the disorientation had worn off, and he remembered why he was there, he lay back down and took some slow breaths. Out of the hundreds of times he’d been in a hospital bed, this was the first time it had been for a procedure he’d consented to. The first time it had been something he’d wanted.
</p><p>
When they got back home, David stripped off his shirt and started taking off the bandages.
</p><p>
Ruth was tired from hours of being on high alert, but she still managed a: “David, stop, what are you doing?”
</p><p>
“It’s fine,” he reassured her, removing the last of the wrappings.
</p><p>
Two strokes from the Skinsmith, and his chest was fully healed. “I could get rid of the scars completely,” he told Ruth, “But I think I don’t want to.”
</p><p>
He ran a hand over his chest – his<i> flat</i> chest, it hadn’t been flat in years, even with illusions he’d still known what was under there.
</p><p>
It felt so right.
</p><p>
He turned to Ruth. “Thank you,” he said sincerely. “For helping this happen.”
</p><p>
She kissed him softly. “You know, you haven’t stopped smiling since you woke up from the op.”
</p><p>
David shrugged. “Finally got the weight off my chest.” (Ruth groaned at the pun.)
</p><p>
He pulled his shirt back on but didn’t button it. He wanted to take some time to bask in the gender euphoria for a bit.
</p><p>
Besides, Ruth was definitely checking him out.</p>
  </div><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_foot_notes"><b>Author's Note:</b><blockquote class="userstuff"><p>Ruth is seeing her boyfriend shirtless for the first time ever and she is trying to Look Respectfully. David can tell where Ruth’s looking because he just can.</p><p>Here’s the thing: I don’t write David or Ruth as trans in my other fics, but that doesn’t mean that one or both of them can’t be interpreted as trans by the reader.</p><p>For example, even in my fics when I can’t find a way to mention David’s autism or Jewishness, I won’t do anything to contradict that; David will never like loud noises or bright lights, and he will never eat bacon. (Which is why some of my fics with David in aren’t tagged as Canon Jewish Character or Canon Autistic Character – David is still 100% Jewish and autistic in them, but it doesn’t feel right to use the tag if it won’t be mentioned in the actual fic.)</p><p>Similarly, what David and Ruth keep in their underwear will probably never be mentioned in my fics (I have no interest in writing smut, so it will likely never come up), so for my other fics, my readers are free to interpret one or both of David and Ruth as trans however they wish. (t4t they’d obviously not care that each other was trans, and I’m certain that cis!David would still be attracted to trans!Ruth, and cis!Ruth would still be attracted to trans!David.)</p><p>Writing this fic was really interesting for me. Applying the trans experience to David and Ruth’s characters really added another dimension.</p><p>On one hand we have Ruth, who’s always known that she’s trans but was never safe to come out until she came to the X-Mansion, but once she was there she had all the resources for transitioning that she needed. Her experience is based less off gender dysphoria, and more on gender euphoria.</p><p>On the other hand, we have David, initially identifying as a lesbian before he started experiencing gender dysphoria. His parents accepted his identity, but without hormones he’s had to rely on reality manipulation to get the body he wants, and a binder which he likes wearing, but being autistic means that tight clothing doesn’t always feel good for him. He also had to deal with the disrespect of being constantly deadnamed and misgendered while on Muir.</p><p>Random piece of info: I’ve always headcanoned one of David’s alters (Lady Delphic) to be a trans woman, though I’m yet to find a way to include it in a fic. David of course supports her in this.</p><p>I decided to make Merzah trans so that David would have an experience of being guided and cared for by a trans elder who’d understand his experience. And he’s called Merzah: in other words, trans!Merzah realised he could name himself literally whatever he wanted, and he didn’t want something boring. In comics, Merzah was a member of the Crazy Sues in the 1940s and he presented as a man back then. Testosterone therapy was invented in about 1935, so this works with my timeline for his transition.</p><p>At the same time, I brought up the fact that it’s been proven that there’s an exact 50/50 gender split for autistic people, it’s just that 80% of autistic women go undiagnosed. So in this fic, trans!David’s autism diagnosis comes later than comic!David’s diagnosis, because before his transition, his autistic behaviours were ignored because he was viewed as a girl.</p><p>(Also, I just want to mention that a higher percentage of autistic people are trans than allistic people. I guess we find it easier to ignore society’s gender norms, so a trans autistic person is perhaps more likely to realise that they’re trans.)</p><p>Then there’s the whole thing of taking a new mutant name. In the comics, some mutants find their mutant name freeing, whereas David despises the name Legion so much that it’s almost like a deadname. Plus the fact that in X-Men Legacy, David is wandering around the Himalayas for god-knows-how-many-days, and doesn’t start to grow a beard even slightly.</p><p>I have intentionally not mentioned David or Ruth’s deadnames in this fic. I don’t think that you need to specify deadnames in order to tell a trans person’s story.</p><p>Comments and kudos are always welcome &lt;3</p><p>Disclaimer: I do not own the characters. I am not making money from this work.</p></blockquote></div></div>
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